BREAKING: Court of Appeal Rules Epping Migrant Hotel Must Stay Open

The Court of Appeal has ruled that the Bell Hotel in Epping must remain open to migrants despite the apparent violation of planning law in a victory for the Government and blow to campaigners.

Lord Justice Bean, sitting with Lady Justice Nicola Davies and Lord Justice Cobb, read a 120-paragraph summary of their decision at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. From the Telegraph.

Three senior judges have ruled Mr Justice Eyre made a “number of errors” when granting the temporary injunction. 

Lord Justice Bean said: “We conclude that the judge made a number of errors which undermine his decision.

“The judge’s approach ignores the obvious consequence that the closure of one site means capacity needs to be identified elsewhere in the system.”

He added that such an injunction “may incentivise” other councils to take similar steps as Epping Forest District Council.

He said: “The potential cumulative impact of such ad-hoc applications was a material consideration… that was not considered by the judge.”

The Telegraph recaps the background:

Earlier this month council leaders won a temporary injunction to close the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, after it became a focus for anti-immigration protests. All asylum seekers faced having to leave the hotel by September 12th.

The Home Office and owners Somani Hotels Ltd later appealed the decision.

At the Court of Appeal on Friday, Lord Justice Bean, Lady Justice Nicola Davies and Lord Justice Cobb ruling in the Home Office’s favour and ordered for the interim-injunction to be overturned.

A final decision on the future of the hotel is set to be decided at a later court date this autumn. 

It comes after Home Office lawyers argued on Thursday that asylum seekers’ rights are more important than the concerns of the people of Epping.

They said that Yvette Cooper had a duty as Home Secretary to prevent asylum seekers from being made destitute under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and so they should continue to live at the Bell Hotel.

They claimed this responsibility trumped the council’s powers to close the hotel, which has been at the centre of protests in recent weeks after an asylum seeker living there was accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year-old schoolgirl.

The ruling prevents the Government’s asylum policy from being plunged into chaos and could prevent other councils moving to close down asylum hotels in their areas.

Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick said councils “can and should still act to close hotels”:

Yvette Cooper used taxpayer money – your money – to keep open a hotel housing illegal migrants.

The Government’s lawyers argued accommodating illegal migrants was in the ‘national interest’. In court they said the right of illegal migrants to free hotels is more important than the rights of the British people.

Well, they are not. The British Government should always put the interests of the British people first. Starmer’s Government has shown itself to be on the side of illegal migrants who have broken into our county.

He insisted the ruling was “not a free pass for asylum hotels”, adding: “Councils can and should still act to close hotels. If they don’t, residents will rightly ask, on whose side are they?”

Follow the Telegraph‘s live coverage here.

What’s unclear here is why the Home Office’s management problem of needing to find somewhere else to put the asylum seekers – and the potential of a snowball effect – should be relevant to the legal matter of whether the hotel is in breach of planning law in changing its use to the housing of asylum seekers. Is there some kind of override in planning law that says Home Office management problems take priority over planning rules? It seems unlikely – and if not, it’s hard to avoid the implication that the court is just making up law on the hoof for the benefit of the Government and to bail out a broken asylum system.

The judges criticised Justice Eyre for giving “little weight over the desirability of preserving the status quo until that point”. But in issuing the injunction Justice Eyre argued that the presence of protests was one of the reasons he was making the interim order, i.e., this was a reason, in his view, that it was not desirable simply to “preserve the status quo” at the hotel. However, the appeal judges called this aspect of his judgment “worrying”, saying that it would only encourage more protests – ergo, protests (and by implication the risk of public disorder) must not be taken into account when granting interim injunctions. But if an interim injunction over a planning dispute cannot be granted when there are major public protests, it makes you wonder what the point of them is – the presence of protests (and the risk of disorder) over a matter of strong local feeling would seem a natural reason why a judge might deem an interim order appropriate in a planning dispute. And once again, we must ask if this prohibition on taking into account protests when granting interim orders is something written into planning law or something that the appeals judges have just made up on the spot. Was Justice Eyre really forbidden by the letter of the law from taking the protests into account? Again, it seems unlikely. Once more, it appears that the appeals court judgment was not about enforcing the law as it is written, but as the judges and Government wish it was written for their convenience and to shore up a deeply unpopular asylum system.